It Pours

Partridge Pea

The day before Mother's Day this past May, my mom took a tumble while fetching the mail and face-planted at the end of her driveway. After being set back up on her feet by two passing Good Samaritans, she was rushed to the local ER by my niece, where the staff stitched up a few gashes and put what turned out to be a slightly broken hand in a soft cast. Just to be on the safe side, they took a few CT images of her head and neck, which were both okay. But...the images picked up an incidental finding: a mass in the upper lobe of her right lung. A fews weeks and a few more images later, plus a meeting with the doc, and we had a diagnosis—early stage lung cancer.

How about that? Now it's a family affair. Mom and I are lung cancer twinsies, sorta. Since Mom's fateful fall A LOT has happened. There was a big thoracic surgery to get the tumors out. There was a miserable hospital stay. There were my feeble attempts to look after Mom during that hospital stay. There was also, on the very the day Mom and I left for said hospital stay, the breaking of my husband's foot (which four weeks later we learned was not really a break, but probably a bad sprain, and that he'd just spent four weeks in a boot because an old fracture was mistaken for a new one). 

See that tiny fracture on the right
metatarsal? It happened about
60 years ago.

After spending most of July in New York with Mom, we drove back to Nashville with my husband sharing the backseat with our dogs and keeping his foot elevated on the folded-down front passenger seat (bless you Subaru for that design!). I should mention here that we'd toted our bicycles all the way to New York to ride our beloved rail trails and never used them once. So we toted them all the way home again, where they've spent most of the summer resting in the basement next to our similarly retired kayaks.

But in the meantime Mom is doing great! She's killin' it in her physical therapy! Her oxygen saturation level is steadily climbing. She's got a sassy new haircut and looks fabulous! Yay, Mom!

Mom getting ready for PT in the pool!

And THEN, sister calls me one 5:30 a.m. to report she and Mom are at the ER and things look dire! And they are! Kinda. It's a very dangerous pulmonary embolism. Mom is admitted and put on blood thinners. Eventually she goes home, still on blood thinners. Sister and Mom go to the onc, who has the findings from genomic testing, which say Mom's cancer is positive, get this, for the EGFR driver mutation!!!! Okay so it's not ROS1, like me, so we're not total cancer twinsies, but wow, right? The good news is that there is a very good targeted therapy called Tagrisso for EGFR+ cancer, so Mom and her onc are looking into that possibility for keeping her cancer in check.

But wait, that's not ALL! Shortly after we get Mom's PE under control, we learn another member of our close-knit nuclear family MIGHT BE FACING A SCARY CANCER DIAGNOSIS! I'm not going to say more about that yet because there are still too many questions around it, but I'll definitely keep you posted. What the hell?! 

Last thing, I promise. And this is especially for anyone who was kind enough to come to or tune into a poetry reading I gave last week. Yeah, that one, from which I beat a hasty retreat just as I started to read my last poem. That was me having a projectile vomiting incident. Uh huh. First time in public though (at least without alcohol involvement, lol!). TMI, I know. Sorry. It was horrible, gross, mortifying, and also, well, a little bit hilarious. But this thing with my poor digestion has happened enough over the past year, and quite intensively in the past week, so often that I was persuaded at least to pursue a diagnosis other than reflux. Heck, I even visited the ER myself and spent a few days in hospital so the doctors could poke around and come up with a few imaginative possibilities. And apparently, there are a few more unpleasant diagnostic procedures in my future.

All of this is to say, I'm good. No, really, very very good. Lots to be grateful for, many things going well. I'm just ... a little busy.

A Ladybeetle on Milkweed

P.S. I'm taking a seven-month long course to become a certified Tennessee Naturalist. I will, therefore, be decorating all my blog posts with random things I see on my walks. Hence the Ladybeetle and the Partridge Pea above. My aim in learning this curriculum is to eventually be useful as a Naturalist-Poet-Educator-Yogi. See, even with Stage 4 cancer, ya gotta have goals. 

P.P.S. This sculpture sat in front of the hospital where my mom had her thoracic surgery. I took this photo because I thought the sculpture was being ironic. "Heal" or maybe "Hale" if we read in rows down. Ha. The more time I spent with my absolutely exhausted mom in the hospital, where she was constantly sleep-deprived due to all the poking and prodding at all hours, and where she was fed unappetizing, tasteless food completely incompatible with what was happening in her body, convinced me that today's medicine overlooks the obvious in favor of protocols set by bureaucrats who have never themselves been patients. The two most important needs for healing, rest and healthful foods, are not ever provided by hospitals. I'm sure there are studies on this, but seriously, how is a person supposed to get well in one of these places?! Things have got to change!